Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @11:04AM
from the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dept.

astroengine follows up to a story about the LHC shutting down that seems to have hit all the news replicators today. "It's to be expected when pushing the frontiers of physics, but the LHC's epic 'will it or won't it' saga continues. Due to an unforeseen construction mistake, the LHC will cease experiments for a year (starting around late-2011) so repairs and upgrades can be carried out. For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum), which is ample for at least 18 months of experiments before shutdown."

... the article linked in the story starts off by debunking the submission.

UPDATE (March 10, 12:45am PST): With thanks to Prof. Jon Butterworth, member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC, I've been informed that the plan to shut down the LHC for an extended period of time was actually announced in early February by Dr. Steve Myers [twitter.com] after the LHC Performance Workshop, in Chamonix, France. So rather than this being a sudden development, it is part of a planned shutdown.

Yeah, an Earth collapsed to a black hole of 2 cm radius should stop spouting off!

No one knows the radius of a black hole. That may be the radius of the event horizon, but the actual black hole is of unknown radius because everyone that's checked hasn't come back. If you are going to spout off science numbers, at least make sure they pass the 3rd grade test.

Obviously the effect which is stopping the LHC from operating works by propagating a "ripple" back in time. Hence, the article summary WAS accurate at the time of submission, but then the ripple reached January and made the shutdown part of the original plan.
It all makes sense!

Certainly. But Occam's razor doesn't tell you what is right, but gives you a way to decide in front of equally-valued evidence or lack of evidence on either side, that the simpler explanation is the most likely to be correct and the one you should assume to be correct. It doesn't remove the need for experimental verification, or disproves strange and complex behavior such as quantum tunnelling or brownian motion.

In this case we are offered two possibilities: some complex, almost-absurd time-warping events c

The plan for a while now was always to have a period of running at lower power/luminosity then a long shutdown to completely fix the error that caused the incident in 2008. Last december the plan was for a 5 month run this year and a year long shutdown, and they changed that in early february to a 18-24 month run and year long shutdown.

...at least according to the article at the end of the supplied link. Quoting a Prof. Brian Cox, "ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how complex machines are operated!"

Now, I know slashdot readers don't read the articles, and I've become accustomed to the editors not reading the articles, but this situation implies that even the submitter of the article didn't read the article.

How is that even possible?

Sounds like one of those recursive quantum anomalies the LHC is designed to unravel...

Like this:Someone sees headlineThey assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.

Reading the article, reading any associated articles and getting a good grasp of the event and technologies involved. Then carefully summarizing the article, linking to the main article and associated article, and providing reference links to Wikipedia. Finally creating an insightful, not overhyped, and clear headline.

After submitting the story, refresh/. and seeing an abortion of a summary on the same story because the/. editors just picked the first one with an exciting headline.

Welcome to the new media, even worse than the old media. True, the tabloids have always been typesetting as if WWIII broke out every day, but at least inside the paper not every headline had to be this absurd brainteaser with extreme hyperbole or no relevance to the actual article. Now every article has to gain it's own ad clicks, and it doesn't matter if it's from "omg what a piece of shit, I can't believe I got suckered by it" or "wow, really great article. I got to bookmark this site" clicks.

Like this:
Someone sees headline
They assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.

... and a month later, when it is no longer news (for nerds or otherwise), the story makes the Slashdot headlines.

Someone sees headlineThey assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.

How about:

Someone see headline, reads the article, decides this is important "news for nerds", and composes a Slashdot submission.

The submission works its way through the queue and eventually gets accepted and posted.

Before (or very shortly after) the Slashdot posting makes it through the queue, the ori

Sounds like one of those recursive quantum anomalies the LHC is designed to unravel...

Actually, we've taken George Lucas' idea of a Death Star and built a giant Laser producing facility on the crust of our planet. Some minor set backs, of course, but we will have the power to destroy an entire planet soon enough. This whole "Quantum Physics" thing was just to get all the physicists on board, since most of them actually favour Star Trek.

What this really means is that after scheduled maintenance of 2011 (which now includes bolstering against quench damage), the LHC will be slowly brought to full power in 2012. Reaching full power at the end of 2012. December 2012. Need I say more?

Would this be kind of like NASA with Apollo 13? Screw superstition, we will do everything we can to make it the worst possible time to teach the idiots to not be superstitious. Does Friday the 13th fall in Dec 2012?

No no, WE are the lackeys for the editors. They are basically just like "What's this mean?" and the commenters argue about it for a while and the people who bothered to read, or are very funny, float to the top.

"Now we need someone to pipe up that if they used Agile Methodology when building the LHC, none of the design issues would have happened."

If they'd have used the Agile Methodology it'd be working, but the particles would travel at 60 miles per hour, and the collisions would be recorded by a police sketch artist. Improvements would be scheduled for a future sprint.

Given the way Agile is usually implemented, it would have then made a detour under London before making it back to Switzerland. Kind of like the famous cartoon [wordpress.com]... especially the documentation part. Nice legs...

quite frankly i'm so sick of people critisising the LHC, especially the people at fermilab.
firstly most people don;t know a damn thing about particle physics (this includes me but I have a relative expert on hand to answer my queries) unless you have some knowledge of beyond degree level particle physics or know someone who does quite well. KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.
for those people (probablly americans) stop critising the LHC becuase its bigger than the accelerator at fermilab. thats like kids argu

for those people (probablly americans) stop critising the LHC becuase its bigger than the accelerator at fermilab. thats like kids arguing over who has a better skateboard.

Yes, it's exactly like that.

You seem to not understand that our TVs, sound systems, sports cars and particle accelerators are simply the adult extensions of our skateboards.

KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.

Why? It's called freedom of speech - perhaps you've heard of it.

You certainly seem to think that you have it, by virtue of the protocols you've issued.

News flash - since the beginning of time people have freely expressed opinion without regard for fact - and this is never more true than when the speaker is convinced that they are expressing facts. Now, I wasn't around at the beginning of time, so far as I recall, but it's my opinion that that behavior has been occurring for at least that long and is therefore neither limited to Americans nor to Fermilab fans.

My other opinion is that you're probably upset that Fermilab isn't in Europe and that you're simply jealous that you're missing out on all the fun.

But you are providing plenty - for me anyway. This snippet is simply priceless:

quite frankly i'm so sick of people critisising the LHC, especially the people at fermilab. firstly most people don;t know a damn thing about particle physics...

Uh - ok - would those be the people at Fermilab that don't know a damn thing?

BTW - my skateboard has something like 300 BHP, a gazillion ft-lbs of torque, and gets 21 miles per gallon when cruising at just over 100 miles per hour, when cruising that way for about 2 to 2.5 hours at a stretch. And as soon as I translate a gazillion ft-lbs into SI, I'll get back to you on what that means - or - I'll just wait for an opinion from Illinois on that.

And almost finally, in my opinion, I deserve extra crunchy mod points just for avoiding the whole bigger vs. keeping it up line of jokes in response to your post (which given that there is NO NEWS in TFA, makes your complaint even funnier).

NOT IMPORTANT

That's the worst sig ever. In my opinion, you should have a higher opinion of yourself, even if that current sig summarizes the opinions in your post perfectly.

I think you should cheer up now and have a fabulous day, but that's just another one of my opinions.

A lot of the people at Fermilab are LHC collaborators. They're helping build the LHC, and will use it when it is built. I haven't seen a criticism of the LHC from anyone at Fermilab. If there was, that person would presumably know bit about particle physics, since he or she works at one of the largest particle accelerators in the world.

I hear that a level in the next Duke Nukem will take place in LHC facility. A PS3/360 trophy/achievement will be rewarded for finding the secret door to the main ring, repairing damage caused by mutated aliens, and escaping through a black hole created by incompetent CERN scientists.

Once again, the timestream moves to protect itself. If they continue attempting to create Higgs-Boson particles at the LHC, we will find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly unlikely reality. Construction accidents, birds dropping baguettes into the particle beam, anything can happen to prevent this.

Mark my word, something improbable will happen to the LHC near the end of this repair work.

We should harness this power to direct the future time stream and create a drive that uses these disturbed probabilities

Should be easy enough, just build a universe destroying device that sets itself off unless what you want to happen happens. The hard part is making the probability of the device failing be less than the probability of whatever you want to happen randomly happening. Unfortunatly, considering that you teleporting to Mars is unlikely to happen over the course of several million universe lifetimes, that would have to be a pretty foolproof device.

I think you're looking at his "increasing" differently than he is. As Universal Improbability increases, the probability of the probable decreases. Given the action/reaction principle, this means that the probability of the improbable increases.

In other words, increasing improbability means a greater chance that the improbable will come to pass.

Otherwise it would be impossible for anything unlikely to ever happen at all.

If you're increasing improbability, it makes it less likely for anything to ever happen at all. Universal or not, if you increase probability, everything is less likely. Sure, as you approach impossibility of anything happening, the probable's probability comes closer to probability of the improbable, but it doesn't increase the probability of anything happening at all. There's no set number of events that must happen. The minimum is zero.

That's not how it works at all - we only experience the realities in which the LHC hasn't destroyed reality. All other realities have been destroyed, so we're not around to experience them. No timestream editing required.

That's also why you aren't dead - you are not around to experience all of the realities in which you are dead, so you never will.

On a more rational note: in order for unlikely events to happen, you need time and space. The more space you have, the less time it takes for something unlikely t

Apparently by making the LHC work we will cause some disaster so time travelers from an alternate future make sure it stays broken so the disaster will not happen. That or God just doesn't want to be found.

As a physicist, all I can say is we've been asking for this kind of press.

When you hype the bejeezus out of the shiny new multi-billion dollar tool, it's reasonable for the people who paid for it to expect results. It is jarring when people hear for over a decade about the great results that will come out of an experiment, and then later hear that we have to spend ~50% of the time doing maintenance on the equipment, and the first few years just testing it. I know this is the way things work, this is the way my (much, much smaller) experiments work. This is not a complaint about the science, or being careful. This is a complaint about politics, funding structures and a lack of ability across fields to communicate effectively with the general public. We can't keep doing this to ourselves if we want the public to trust us. We have to manage the media better.

To begin with, the great achievement of the LHC *is* the LHC, not the search for the Higgs boson. It's enough that this is the most complicated, impressive, advanced piece of technology on the planet, and that it required input at the cutting edge from nearly every major field of physics. Just like the point of going to the moon was to go to the moon, not to bring back moon rocks.

PR is not about being well-understood, it's about getting a desired, concrete result. The public is largely stupid and fickle. If you let little PR blips like this bother you, you'll never accomplish anything great. Ultimately if the LHC delivers new science, that is all anyone in future history will remember it for. It's aggravating to read bad press but most of it just doesn't matter over time.

It's pretty obvious that what's happening is that every time they start it up at full power, it collapses the false vacuum and instantly destroys the universe. So the only versions of the state vector we can observe are the ones in which the LHC never ramps up all the way, because we've been destroyed in the rest of them...

I'm sorry, I don't have references, but someone was explaining to me that the parts and construction for the LHC are excessively shoddy. He mentioned the size of the magnets and, I believe, mentioned that they weren't really tested before being put in place. His beef was that the whole thing is basically just a huge money sinkhole and may not ever produce the kinds of results it promises.

I'm suspecting that even when the LHC is running at full power, the Femri will continue on. If you've got a perfectly good working particle accelerator, it makes sense to do your lower powered experiments at Fermi and the high powered ones at the LHC.

However, I cant see why would you deem "secure" a work envirnoment that subjects you to gigantic and powerful electromagnetic fields plus you are confined quite in the same location as some really interesting radioactive material.

For a physic, barring actual spacewalking, its about as hardcore as it gets.

When I worked in automation, "shutdown" was the standard terminology used to describe a period when production was run down; it's usually when I was working - it's the only time you can get in to make major changes that would be otherwise disruptive or impossible. You usually got one shutdown period in summer and another over the Christmas period.

If you wanted to say something was being dismantled, you'd probably say "decommissioned", since that's the opposite of what we did when we put things in (i.e. com

Dude you have it backwards - a "shutdown" is when you shut-down the plant. It may not actually be 100% shut down, but it will not be producing anything. Now, WHY you do a shutdown could be scheduled maintenance, upgrade projects, or someone may have screwed up the logic in a PLC forcing the shutdown.

If you didn't notice, the name "shutdown" is incredibly descriptive about what exactly is happening. In the oil industry they call them "shut-ins" because that's exactly what they do. In either case, it does

You read my post backwards. Probably because it was written passively. Let me write it non-passively. When something goes down for maintenance, you call it a shut down. I didn't say that it was the only thing called a shut down.